HOMEIf you're having delivery issues, for example, high bounce rates, low open rates, or reports from recipients that your emails are being sent to their junk or spam folder, our expert deliverability team can help you investigate.
Investigating issues related to reaching the inbox can be tricky work, sometimes taking days to determine what could be the cause. We appreciate how frustrating the wait can be when you're trying to run your business, which is why we try to help our customers diagnose problems themselves, if possible.
Before you contact us
The first thing our deliverability experts will do when they receive your support request, is check what level of email authentication you've set up on your sending domain. Setting up email authentication:
- Proves that your emails are from you, and that they haven't been tampered with.
- Lowers the chance of your emails being blocked by inbound mail servers.
- Results in fewer bounced emails.
Have you set up DKIM authentication?
To save time, you can quickly check this for yourself. In your account:
- Click your profile image at the top right, then click Account settings.
- Click Authentication.
If you see a verified sending domain on the page, as shown in the image below, it may rule out one possible cause for your deliverability issues. However, you should also check to see if your DKIM key is outdated.
If you don't see a verified sending domain on the page, it means your emails have been sent with Campaign Monitor's default authentication. DKIM is still used when we send emails on your behalf, but if you're seeing problems with one email, there's a good chance you'll continue to have problems with future emails.
You should not resend the email you had deliverability issues with after setting up authentication. By doing so, you risk annoying people who received it the first time, and they are likely to mark the email as spam. These complaints hurt your ability to deliver to their inbox in the future.
Outdated DKIM keys
If you set up DKIM authentication prior to 2013, you could be using a 768-bit key. These shorter length, older keys are ignored by some mail servers, which require 1024-bit keys in order to validate DKIM.
You can use a third party DNS testing tool like EmailStuff to check the length of your existing DKIM key:
- Click your profile image at the top right, then click Account settings.
- Click Authentication.
- Click the DKIM authenticated domain you want to check. You will see the DKIM key for the selected domain.
- Copy the DKIM record to your clipboard.
- Open the EmailStuff DKIM page.
- Paste the DKIM record into the "Check a DKIM key record" field. Then click Check.
If it's not a 1024-bit key, you will see a message similar to that shown in the image below.
You can generate a new, 1024-bit key by deleting the sending domain from your account, then following the steps to add it again.
To delete a sending domain from your account, hover your cursor over the entry, then click the trash can icon that appears on the right.